Ken Caldeira

Ken Caldeira is a scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology. His views on climate change and geoengineering are often misrepresented by the press as favoring inaction on greenhouse gas reduction. (His actual views are seen in the quotations below and at greater length in an Oct 2009 interview.[1])

Research

Quotations

(emphases added)

"Carbon dioxide is the right villain, insofar as inanimate objects can be villains." [8]

"We need to eliminate CO2 emissions — about this there is no question in my mind. ... I do not see [geoengineering] as an alternative to CO2 emissions reductions, but it may be something we need to do to, for example, prevent great ice sheets from sliding into the ocean. ... When a patient is brought into the intensive care unit, doctors try to stabilize blood chemistry to avoid additional organ failure while trying to resolve the fundamental causes of those blood chemistry imbalances. We may at some point find that we need to bring our planet into the intensive care unit. Obviously, we need to work, by eliminating CO2 emissions, to keep our planet out of the ICU, but things have progressed far enough to make me question whether we will be sufficiently successful in this endeavor."[9]

In 2007, Caldeira said "When the s-- really hits the fan--when huge droughts in the Midwestern breadbasket are collapsing our agriculture system, ice sheets are melting, sea levels are rising, and we're getting hit by Katrina-scale hurricanes--geoengineering might be an emergency backup system we could deploy. We should avoid geoengineering if possible, but we need it in our toolbox in case of catastrophe."[10]

"I think this whole line of argument about how much greenhouse gas emissions come from conferences about greenhouse gas emissions reduction is pernicious. ... The success of the summit is far more important than any CO2 that might be emitted traveling to or from the summit." [11]

Caldeira's geoengineering recommendations have been covered without noting that he considers geoengineering to be an emergency measure, not a cure:

One blogger noted[12] an omission in an NPR geoengineering report: "NPR has a brief piece on geo-engineering, also focusing on the sulfate aerosol flavor, including some quotes from Ken Caldeira among others that likewise makes no mention of ocean acidification.... [yet] Caldeira ...[has] been doing a lot of work on ocean acidification"[13]; Caldeira responded in a comment, explaining that he views geoengineering as an "intensive care unit" intervention[9].

In their 2009 book SuperFreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner mischaracterized Caldeira as advocating geoengineering in place of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, falsely saying "his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight."[14]. Caldeira subsequently changed his home page to include the "CO2 is the right villain"[8] quote, and in an interview[1] went further, stating:

"the actual statements attributed to me are based on fact, but the contexts and the framing of those issues are very different from the context and framing that I would put those same facts in...So I think that the casual reader can... come up with a misimpression of what I believe and what I feel about things."

Personal

Caldeira states "As far as I know, I bear no close relation to [R.J. Reynolds Public Issues Field staff] Steve Caldeira..."[15]